Degrees :
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
M.A., University of East Anglia, England
B.A., University of Birmingham, England

Biography / Academic Interests :
John Dixon is a historian of early America and the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. His research interests include intellectual and cultural history, the Enlightenment, New York history, the history of science, and Jewish history.

A former associate editor of the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, Professor Dixon received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. He joined the College of Staten Island in 2009, and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a variety of topics, such as America before 1865, American ideas, the history of New York, historical methods, and historiography.

Professor Dixon’s first book, The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. It recreates the enlightened culture of an eighteenth-century statesman, botanist, historian, cartographer, and natural philosopher who claimed to have discovered the cause of gravity and who became one of the most hated political figures in pre-Revolutionary New York.

Scholarship / Publications :
The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Useful Knowledge and Unreasonable Politics in British New York (Cornell University Press, due 2015).

“Henry F. May and the Revival of the American Enlightenment: Problems and Possibilities for Intellectual and Social History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 71, no. 2, April 2014, pp. 255–80.